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SUSE signs up with Inktank for Ceph on SUSE Cloud

Inktank has announced that SUSE will be partnering with it to bring the Ceph distributed storage system to SUSE's OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud. Inktank has worked to integrate Ceph with OpenStack as both a block storage and object storage device and, under the agreement, would provide enterprise-level support to SUSE and its customers. SUSE Cloud, one of the first OpenStack distributions for private clouds, uses the Dell-developed Crowbar, which works with Chef to automate the deployment of cloud nodes. SUSE plans to ensure that Crowbar will be able to easily deploy Ceph on OpenStack-based clouds.

Ceph's distributed storage layer sits on top of operating systems, running as a number of daemons. It offers object storage with native language bindings and a REST interface, a block device layer which can be striped and replicated over clusters, and a POSIX-compliant network filesystem for older applications. Ceph's daemons balance data load and location in the storage cluster and allow the system to be self-healing and self-managing, with the nodes actively "gossiping" about cluster status. At the heart of Ceph is an algorithm called CRUSH, which is a pseudo-random placement algorithm used to calculate data distribution over the cluster.

Ceph is an open source project, originally developed by Sage Weil in 2007. In 2012, Weil launched Inktank to provide commercial support for Ceph and expanded the development team. In September, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth invested $1M in Inktank, while announcing that Ceph would be part of Canonical's reference OpenStack architecture.